OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, JULY 21, 2017
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
JEREMY FELDMAN, Circulation Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
OUR VIEW
E
ach week we recognize those people and organizations
in the community deserving of public praise for the good
things they do to make the North Coast a better place to
live, and also those who should be called out for their actions.
SHOUTOUTS
• Riki Irie, owner
of Malama Day Spa,
who has been help-
ing to raise money
for Daxton Olson,
a Seaside baby with
an inoperable brain
tumor. The 8-month-
old boy began a che-
motherapy plan in
Colin Murphey/The Daily Astorian
February, and as
Riki Irie reacts as she sees her shaved head
part of the fundrais- for the first time at the La Boheme salon
ing awareness, Irie
in Astoria on Thursday as supporters look
made a promise to
on behind her. Irie agreed to have her head
shave her head, and shaved if a fundraising goal was met for a
local infant diagnosed with brain cancer.
did so last week. “I
heard the story and
I couldn’t not do something,” she said. Thus far, Irie has been
able to raise $3,300 for the child with a goal of topping $5,000.
She will continue to take donations for the youngster at her
spa, and there is also a GoFundMe account set up for him at
gofundme.com/olson-family-love.
• Amanda Gladics of Oregon Sea Grant, who coordinated
the first ever “Shop the Dock” tours last week that highlighted
Warrenton’s seafood offerings. The tours helped show peo-
ple what’s available and where and gave attendees an up-close
look at fisheries and the Skipanon Brand Seafood processing
facility. More tours are planned in September.
• Lou Neubecker and members of Seaside’s Community
Center and Senior Commission, for raising needed money
to help begin renovation of the city’s Bob Chisholm
Community Center. Construction should begin on the project
in the fall after a formal bid process is undertaken. The com-
mission’s fundraising efforts brought in more than $51,000 that
will be combined with money from the city to refurbish the
main hall and renovate the center’s entryway and classrooms.
• The nonprofit Friends of the Astoria Column group,
who honored the late Hal Snow during a recent City Council
meeting. Snow, a former city attorney who died in December,
was a founding member of the group as well as Friends of the
Liberty Theater and Astoria High School Scholarships Inc.
Jordan Schnitzer, a Portland developer, philanthropist and
president of Friends of the Astoria Column, called Snow “the
conscience of the Column,” and credited him for where the
nonprofit and the 91-year-old monument are today. Next year,
the nonprofit group will celebrate its 30th anniversary.
• U.S. Coast Guard Cmdr. Kristen Serumgard, who
recently passed command of the Coast Guard cutter Fir
to Lt. Cmdr. Jason Haag. The cutter, known as The Bar
Tender, maintains 117 buoys and other aids to navigation on
the Columbia River and along the coastline. It also main-
tains weather buoys for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. It is based at North Tongue Point. Serumgard
took over the ship in 2014 and leaves to the East Coast to com-
mand the International Ice Patrol, which monitors the presence
of icebergs in the Atlantic and Arctic oceans.
• Clatsop County Clerk Valerie Crafard, who retired
from her position after three years. Crafard joined the county
in 2006 as a human resources assistant and clerk of the Board
of Commissioners, and filled in as the county clerk temporar-
ily in 2014 before being hired into that position permanently
in March 2015. The clerk’s duties include keeping and admin-
istering the county’s public records and archives as well as
legal recordings, passports and marriage licenses. The clerk is
also involved in overseeing elections and voter registration and
coordinating property tax appeals.
CALLOUTS
• A thief who recently stole an 18-foot boat from the
Skipanon Marina in Warrenton and then abandoned it after
heading south on the river and found he couldn’t get past
the Eight Street Dam. Warrenton Police found the 1993
Alumaweld boat submerged with the motors still attached near
the dam along with items the thief apparently left behind. The
boat’s owner and a group of friends were able to refloat the
craft and remove it from the area, and officers say they have
a suspect in the case and are also investigating how the boat
sank.
Suggestions?
Do you have a Shoutout or Callout you think we should know about? Let
us know at news@dailyastorian.com and we’ll make sure to take a look.
Is the news media an
‘existential’ threat?
By BRET STEPHENS
New York Times News Service
D
ear Dennis,
To err is human. To tweet
is to regret. When I decided
last month to leave
Twitter, it was
in part because I
knew that, while I
couldn’t avoid the
former, I could at
least escape the lat-
ter. Not everything
that pops into the heads of smart
people is smart. Still less of it needs
to be shared.
“Silence is better for the wise, and
how much more so for fools.” I’m
sure you know the proverb.
So it was with a grain of salt that I
read your Bastille Day tweet:
“The news media in the West
pose a far greater danger to Western
civilization than Russia does,”
Dennis Prager tweeted.
It sounded, frankly, like the kind
of involuntary mental wet burp many
of us have at moments of peak ideo-
logical irritation — for conservatives,
often while reading the editorial
pages of this newspaper.
I didn’t think you could possibly
mean it. Turns out, you do.
On Tuesday you doubled down
with an online column for Townhall.
“The real threat to Western civiliza-
tion is Western civilization ceasing to
believe in itself,” you write. “And, in
that regard, Russia poses no danger,
while the left-wing dominated media
and universities pose an existential
threat.”
You’re a smart guy, Dennis, and
it’s not a dumb column. “Attacking
what the media is doing is not the
same as attacking the existence of
the media,” you say. True. “Putin is
indeed a murderous quasi-dictator,”
you acknowledge. Delete “quasi”;
otherwise correct. “Civilization
connotes a body of ideas and a value
system,” you add, making the point
that Russia’s nukes can’t destroy it.
Well, OK, that’s one way of defining
civilization.
You end with a list of various
things being done to Western civili-
zation in the name of multicultural-
ism, anti-DWEMism and so on, none
of it with the help of Putin. Much of
it is indeed bad, though I’m not sure
that Justin Trudeau declaring there
is “no core identity, no mainstream
in Canada” counts as a Spenglerian
moment in the story of Western
decline.
But, yes, there’s a lot that’s dumb
about the academy and a lot that’s
wrong with journalism. It should
be criticized, not feared. Foolish
conservatives often assume every
instance of institutional malfunction
is a symptom of civilizational cancer.
Wiser conservatives know, as Adam
Smith did, that “there is a great deal
of ruin in a nation.”
Wiser conservatives — and I
count you among them, Dennis
AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
Deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders
points as she answers questions during the daily press briefing at
the White House Thursday.
— also know that when we speak
of “the West,” what we’re talking
about is a particular strain within it.
Marx and Lenin, after all, are also
part of the Western tradition, as are
Heidegger and Hitler.
For us, on the other hand, “the
West” is the liberal-democratic
tradition; the one most succinctly
expressed in the Declaration of
Independence. “All men are created
equal.” “The consent of the gov-
erned.” “The Laws of Nature and of
Nature’s God.” “Life, Liberty and
the pursuit of Happiness.” All the
rest, from Exodus to Gettysburg, is
commentary.
To be
indifferent to
every claim of
truth or fact
is the ultimate
assertion of
power.
That’s why the intelligent conser-
vative has no time either for illiberal-
ism, often of the right, or relativism,
typically of the left. And that’s why
wise conservatives take the threat
from Vladimir Putin seriously. He
is the champion and most insidious
exponent of both.
Through the development of a
crypto-fascist ideology that combines
ferocious ethnic chauvinism and
revanchism, economic corporatism, a
dash of religious traditionalism, and
a personality cult, he is the model for
aspiring autocrats everywhere, from
Hungary to Turkey to the Philippines.
And through Russia Today and
other direct or indirect arms of
Kremlin propaganda, Putin makes
common cause with his old comrades
on the far left. In the main, the goal
is to undermine the West every way
they can, from exposing military and
diplomatic secrets via WikiLeaks, to
intervening in and calling into ques-
tion the legitimacy of the democratic
process, to raising the bogus specter
of a “deep state” that suppresses the
popular will.
No wonder the best book yet
written about Putin’s Russia, by Peter
Pomerantsev, is titled “Nothing is
True and Everything is Possible.”
I’m sending it to you as a birthday
present, Dennis. Relativism greases
the skids for illiberalism. That’s why
we NeverTrumpers believe there is a
connection between Donald Trump’s
compulsive lying and his undisguised
personal affinity for Putin that goes
beyond the question of who said
what at last year’s Russia meeting
in Trump Tower. The connection is
philosophical.
To be indifferent to every claim
of truth or fact is the ultimate asser-
tion of power. It is to say: Nothing
restrains me, not what I promised
yesterday, not what I am saying to
you now, not what I might do tomor-
row. That’s how Putin operates in his
sphere. That’s how Trump operates
in ours. What’s worse is to see so
many conservatives who should
know better excuse one president and
line up behind the other.
Dennis, you got your wish:
Hillary Clinton isn’t president and
never will be. But the responsibility
of a public intellectual like you
isn’t to spend the next several years
justifying your vote. It’s to see things
plain and in their true perspective. To
suggest that Vladimir Putin is a dis-
tant nuisance but Maggie Haberman
or David Sanger is an existential
threat to our civilization isn’t seeing
things plain, to put it mildly.
It used to be that conservatives
thought liberals were wrong while
liberals thought conservatives were
evil. Among the other ways in which
Trump has degraded the conservative
movement is that he’s turned us into
a mirror image of what we used to
accuse liberals of being. He’s turned
us into haters.
Don’t be a hater, Dennis.
Disavow, delete and rethink that
stupid tweet.
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